This Week in the Laboratories of Democracy

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(Permanent soundtrack to this recurring feature...)

Welcome back to our weekly survey of hot pol-on-pol action in the various states where, as we all know, the real work of governmentin' takes place and where the voice of the people is most clearly heard... speaking in tongues, shouting inchoate appeals to the Goat God, and howling at the moon.

We begin, quite hilariously, in the state of Rhode Island, to which former Red Sox pitcher and noted Republican blowhard Curt Schilling moved his video-game start-up company down there two years ago after the Ocean State gave him a $75 million loan guarantee. (Curt is a "small government" conservative. He would like the government to be just small enough to fit into his wallet.) Well, Curt's business is rather after cratering at the moment, and he's come to the state, asking for more help against the merciless pasting The Invisible Hand is dealing out to him. Meanwhile, everybody in Rhode Island's state government feels really bad about it, but they have declined to offer Schilling any further goodies. (In fact, the head of the agency that gave him the loan guarantee recently resigned and did so with a sort of bizarre literary flair.) This should be no surprise since the current governor, Lincoln Chaffee, opposed the original loan package while he was running and now appears to have quite mastered the difficult art of mournful snark....

The company released its much-anticipated first game, "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning," to strong reviews in February. But Chafee said the state has consulted industry analysts who say the game was a commercial failure. "As one of the experts said, `This is an industry that punishes people that don't know what they're doing,'" Chafee said.

Schilling, alas, is ducking questions about the whole mess, commenting only occasionally on Facebook. The Free Market's hitting him harder than Jeter ever did.

With the sound of the crash still echoing in our ears, we move swiftly west to Iowa, where the state Republican party has proposed a platform that has to be seen to be believed, and appears to be drawn exclusively from the Comments section of an in-house newspaper serving the state's nervous hospitals. Among its other charms, it's gone partial-birther:

We believe candidates for President of the United States must show proof of being a 'natural born citizen' as required by Article II, Section I of the Constitution - beginning with the 2012 election.

It doesn't stop there, however. The Iowa Republicans — the people who keep electing racist nutball Steve King to Congress, and who, we were assured, had to be absolutely vital to the process of electing our next president — have loaded up their tray at the All U Can Eat Batshit Buffet.

Our old friend, Agenda 21 — 2.13: We demand that the term "sustainable development" be defined, vetted, and controlled by county and state agricultural agencies whose private property it impacts rather than the UN, other international or Agenda 21 agencies, or any federal organization. — makes an appearance in several places, as the Iowa Republicans fend off the U.N. plot to make us all recycle and live in high-rise apartment buildings in hellholes like Ottumwa and Cedar Rapids.

Also, ACORN is back! 3.14: We strongly oppose government monies being given to private organizations such as Planned Parenthood, AARP, ACORN, ACLU, and other groups which lobby for policies contrary to the views expressed in this platform.

It supports a Personhood Amendment designed after the one that was too damn crazy for Mississippi.

It is firmly opposed to the EPA's regulation of farm dust, which doesn't happen to exist. Section 5.4 states that Sharia Law shall not be used in the United States, which happens to be impossible.

It would very much like there to be virtually no federal or state regulations at all on agriculture, and it would just as soon not allow cows to vote — 2.11: We support the proper care and treatment of animals. We oppose laws or regulations elevating the well-being of animals to a similar status as the rights of people.

It calls for the federal government to do a lot of stuff with the federal budget that would delight the folks sitting around the dinner table at the Paul household, but which have less chance of happening than Des Moines does of landing the Super Bowl.

There's also some barely disguised homophobia in a passage opposing hate crime laws — We oppose the unconstitutional concept of a "hate crime" since it is an attempt to criminalize the reasonable actions of persons who oppose the granting of "special status" or "privileges" to defined classes of people. — and an apparent call to roll back federal anti-discrimination statutes to a point somewhere around 1957.

4.7 We support a landlord's right to refuse to lease property and a business owner's right to refuse service based on moral grounds.

How long you figure it would take for "being black" or "being Mexican" to become a moral failure, especially in Steve King's district?

Not much of this has much of a prayer of becoming law, but that's not the fault of the state legislature slightly to the north in Michigan, where some solons have decided to put together a Judeo-Christians-only, No Muslims Need Apply, "Prayer Caucus."

Therefore, let it be known that the undersigned members of the Michigan Legislature, who are duly elected and serving in the State Senate or the State House of Representatives, desire to express our thankfulness to Almighty God for these blessings and to unite as the Michigan Legislative Prayer Caucus (MiLPC); a bipartisan body of believers of Scriptural Truth, adhering to established Judeo-Christian principles and Religious Liberties that were widely practiced by the Founders of these United States of America and the state of Michigan.

Which reminds me for some reason of the answer once given by the late Kirk Fordyce, governor of Mississippi. Fordyce once referred to our "Christian" heritage, and someone asked him if he didn't mean "Judeo-Christian."

"If I'd'a meant Judeo, I'd'a said Judeo," Fordyce thundered.

Leaving the good country heartlanders stew in their own paranoid juices, we hie ourselves hence to Louisiana, which has a state educational psychologist named Mark Traina who pines for the good old days when George Corley Wallace was speaking the truth to the pointy-heads. The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken objection to some of what Traina has done and said, and he took to the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune to defend himself against the charges. This did not help.

"The Southern Poverty Center knows that these allegations are ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE!," Traina wrote in an education forum on NOLA.com last week, using his own name as he criticized the center's earlier allegations. "This is just another way to harass the Jefferson Parish Public School System. One only needs to read the Times Picayune to see who the real trouble makers are. Sadly, it is disproportionately young black males. Everyone knows that our jails throughout the United States are disproportionately filled with black people. Why would the rate be any different in an educational environment?"

Dude, you're gonna need a bigger alibi.

Meanwhile, over in the Guv'nah's old stomping grounds, the Alabama state legislature tried to fix that state's Let-The-Crops-Rot-In-The-Field immigration bill. The old law's under attack in the federal courts and the legislature, in its infinite wisdom, declined to address any of the problems that sent the old law into litigation but, rather, it added some provisions that made the new law worse than the old one.

[Justin] Cox, of the ACLU, said the biggest problem of the new bill was the requirement that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security post online the names of illegal immigrants that appear in state courts. The coalition said that provision "amounts to a 'scarlet letter' provision likely to lead to harassment and vigilantism." The new measure also includes a provision that allows someone to be detained for up to 48 hours while authorities determine their immigration status.

You didn't think we were going to go through a whole edition of this feature and not discuss the unauthorized use of ladyparts, did you? Pennsylvania has become the latest state to decide that it wants to defund Planned Parenthood. (Note to people who believe that the war on women will redound to the political detriment of the Republicans: when does that start, exactly?) The name of the bill — The Whole Woman's Health Funding Priorities Act — is a masterpiece of wingnut doublespeak and the guy behind the bill, a lop-ear named Daryl Metcalfe, appears to be a one-man Iowa Republican Party.

Metcalfe is responsible for a number of other right wing bills whichcould be argued as meaningless. They include anti-immigration legislation, English-only government documents, a bill banning gay marriage, a bill honoring Ronald Reagan, a "Birther" bill challenging President Obama's spot on the Pennsylvania ballot and legislation that would encourage the U.S. Senate to deny a United Nations bill that would tell you how to raise your kids.

And we conclude our tour this week out in sunny California -- Note To Readers: it helps if you read these posts every week in the voice of game-show legend Johnny Olson. Thank you. -- where there are dopes arguing about, well, dope. I would draw your attention to the obviously hilarious typo in the wingnut legislator's statement. And, not for nothing, but that Iowa Republican platform also contains this provision:

2.16: We demand that all laws restricting the growing of industrial hemp be immediately eliminated.